Division  'BS2.4-2.I 

Section  ,'R9<c 


JUN  24  1910 


%/CAL 


Jesus  of  Nazareth 


in  the 


Light  of  Today 


By 

Elbert  'Russell 

Professor  in  Earlham  College 
Author  of  "The  Parables  of  Jestia" 


The  John  C.  Winston  Company 
philadelphia 


Copyright,  1909,  by 
The  John  C  Winston  Co. 


INTRODUCTION. 

The  assertion  in  Hebrews  that 
"Jesus  Christ  is  the  same  yesterday, 
to-day  and  forever'  is  true  of  his 
historical  character  and  of  his  minis- 
try to  the  needs  of  men.  Thru  the 
changing  centuries  he  has  come,  the 
unchanging  Christ,  scattering  "the 
charities  that  soothe,  and  heal,  and 
bless''  at  the  feet  of  men;  giving 
peace  to  the  sin-troubled,  purity  to 
the  defiled,  overcoming  power  to  men 
fighting  feebly  against  temptation, 
and  an  absorbing  purpose  to  aimless 
lives. 

Yet  the  history  of  Christian  art 
and  theology  shows  that  each  age  has, 

8 


INTRODUCTION 

in  a  sense,  a  different  Christ  for  its 
own.  Each  appreciates  him  as  he 
ministers  to  its  peculiar  needs;  each 
paints  him  as  it  sees  him  thru  its  own 
atmosphere,  and  interprets  him  in 
terms  of  its  philosophy. 

This  book,  like  the  lecture  of  which 
it  is  an  enlargement,  is  an  essay 
towards  the  portrait  of  the  twentieth 
century  Christ;  an  effort  to  show 
Jesus  in  his  saving  truth  and  power 
to  those  who  may  be  alienated  from 
the  Christ  of  past  generations. 

Credit  has  been  given  wherever  I 
have  consciously  used  other  mens 
thoughts,  but  it  is  impossible  even  to 
name  the  many  writers  and  teachers 
to  whom  my  thanks  are  due  for  help 
toward  an  appreciation  of  Jesus  of 
Nazareth 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.  The  New  Point  of  View 7 

II.  The    Religious    Genius 12 

III.  The  Originality  of  His  Methods...   17 

IV.  The  Reality  of  Spiritual  Conquest.  21 
V.  Kingdoms  Founded  on  the  Unseen  . .  25 

VI.     The  Survival  of  the  True 30 

VII.     The   Universal  Family 33 

VIII.     The  Historical  Basis  in  the  Family 

OF    Israel    38 

IX.     The   Ability  to   Convince 44 

X.    The     Satisfaction     of     Permanent 

Human  Needs   48 

XI.     The  Height  of  the  Pedestal 59 

XII.     The  Measure  of  a  Man 67 

XIII.     The  Name  Above  Every  Name 74 

XIV.     Pitted  Against  the  Rabbis 78 

XV.     The  Poise  of  His  Character 89 

XVI.     His  Power  to  Touch  the  Conscience.  98 
XVII.     The  Cosmic  Meaning  or  His  Ch.vr- 

ACTER     102 

XVIII.    The  Secret  of  His  Powib 107 


Jesus  of  Nazareth 

In  the  Light  of  To-day 


CHAPTER  I. 

THE  NEW  POINT  OF  VIEW. 

Jesus  of  Nazareth  challenged  the 
men  of  his  time  to  an  opinion  about 
him.  Not  only  by  his  application  of 
Messianic  prophecies  to  himself  and 
by  the  implied  claims  of  his  triumphal 
entry,  but  in  express  words  he  pressed 
upon  the  people  the  question,  "Whom 
say  ye  that  I  am?  What  think  ye 
of  the  Christ?"  These  questions  his 
contemporaries  answered  from  the 
standpoint  of  their  age  according  to 
their  knowledge  of  Jesus  and  their 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

attitude  toward  him.  The  changes 
of  nineteen  centuries,  however,  make 
it  impossible  for  us  to  adopt  their 
answers  without  criticism  or  revision. 
Since  the  sixteenth  century,  espe- 
cially, the  knowledge  and  opinions  of 
the  western  world  have  undergone  so 
great  changes,  that  the  world  we  live 
in  is,  to  our  thought,  very  different 
from  that  in  which  the  men  of  the 
first  century  lived.  This  change, 
which  was  most  rapid  in  the  last  half 
of  the  nineteenth  centurj'',  was  pro- 
duced chiefly  by  the  new  historical 
and  scientific  spirit  and  methods,  and 
by  the  general  acceptance  of  the 
theory  of  evolution.  Modern  his- 
torical inquiry  has  given  new  stand- 
ards of  historical  probability  and 
changed  the  world's  judgment  in 
many  things  as  to  the  course  of 
human  events.  The  new  scientific 
method   has   not   only    freed   men's 

8 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

minds  from  the  Medieval  supersti- 
tions, but  has  created  a  new  sense  of 
God's  ways  in  the  world  and  new  con- 
ceptions of  the  laws  of  spiritual 
things.  These  forces  have  pro- 
foundly influenced  religious  thought. 
Many  religious  opinions  once  unques- 
tioned are  no  longer  tenable  by  the 
modern  mind;  not  so  much  because 
men  have  been  convinced  by  formal 
argument  that  they  are  false,  as  that 
they  no  longer  appear  true  from  the 
new  point  of  view;  that  they  do  not 
fit  in  with  the  world  of  reality  as  seen 
in  the  light  of  to-day. 

It  is  in  this  light  that  we  are  led  to 
re-examine  the  character  and  claims 
of  Jesus.  Let  us  face  the  question 
frankly :  The  twentieth  century  man, 
who  is  in  harmony  with  the  historical 
and  scientific  spirit,  who  thinks  in 
terms  of  the  evolutionary  philosophy, 
who     presupposes     the     commonly 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

accepted  results  of  the  historical  and 
literary  criticism  of  the  Bible,  espe- 
cially of  the  Gospels, — what  shall  he 
think  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth?  Let  us 
attempt  to  form  an  estimate  of  his 
character  and  importance  as  a  force 
in  history  in  the  same  spirit  and  by 
the  same  methods  by  which  we  would 
attempt  to  estimate  the  significance 
of  any  other  historical  personage, 
such  as  Napoleon  or  Hannibal,  Bud- 
dha or  Mohammed. 

We  may  not  avoid  such  an  inquiry 
by  the  plea  that  we  lack  special  quali- 
fications as  philosophers  and  critical 
historians.  The  common  attitude  to 
Jesus  of  Nazareth  must  spring  from 
the  opinions  of  common  men  and 
women  like  ourselves, — men  and 
women  who  are  compelled  to  form 
the  opinions  we  live  by  without  spec- 
ial qualifications,  philosophical  or 
critical.     In  fulfilling  this  duty  the 

10 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

specialists  in  various  lines  of  thought 
give  us  indispensable  aid,  but  in  the 
last  analysis  we  cannot  escape  the 
responsibility  of  forming  our  own 
opinions  as  to  the  attitude  we  ought 
to  take  toward  Jesus  of  Nazareth, 
and  what  place  we  shall  give  him 
among  the  forces  to  which  we  open 
our  lives.  A  proper  sense  of  the 
limitations  of  our  knowledge  will 
keep  us  humble  and  teachable;  but 
the  human  mind,  limited  and  fallible 
as  it  is,  is  the  only  knowing  and  think- 
ing organ  we  possess,  and  we  are 
under  obligations  to  do  the  best  we 
can  with  it.  After  using  every 
means  to  get  at  the  truth,  we  honor 
our  Maker  best  by  living  up  to  what 
the  instruments  he  has  given  us  show 
us  of  truth  and  duty;  for  we  must 
live  by  what  appears  true  rather  than 
by  what  seems  to  be  false. 


11 


CHAPTER  II. 

THE  RELIGIOUS  GENIUS. 

According  to  common  classifica- 
tions of  men,  we  should  call  Jesus  a 
religious  genius.  Religious  matters 
were  from  his  early  youth  his  absorb- 
ing interest;  religious  perfection  was 
the  passion  of  his  life;  and  the  spir- 
itual relations  of  men  occupied  him 
wholly  as  a  teacher.  His  earliest 
recorded  utterance  shows  that  even 
before  his  maturity  he  had  shown  an 
absorbing  interest  in  matters  relig- 
ious. When,  on  the  occasion  of  a 
visit  to  Jerusalem  at  twelve  years  of 
age,  Joseph  and  Mary,  after  a  long 
search,  found  him  at  last  in  the  tem- 

19 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

pie,  he  expressed  surprise  that  their 
previous  knowledge  of  his  ways  and 
interests  had  not  led  them  to  seek  him 
first  of  all  in  the  temple:  "Why  did 
ye  seek  me?"  he  asked,  "Did  ye  not 
know  that  I  must  be  in  my  Father's 
house?" 

Jesus  urged  other  men  to  enter 
into  a  relation  of  perfect  obedience 
with  God,  but  he  claimed  always  to 
have  known  this  relation  himself. 
He  exhorted  other  men  to  repent  of 
their  sins  as  the  only  way  to  enter 
the  kingdom  of  God,  but  no  words 
of  repentance  ever  fell  from  his  own 
lips.  He  claimed  to  live  in  perfect 
unity  with  God.  He  challenged 
men  to  convict  him  of  sin.  This 
claim,  however,  is  not  the  unique 
thing  about  him.  It  is  not  unknown 
for  men  thru  religious  fanaticism  or 
insanity  to  claim  to  be  sinless;  but  it 
is  difficult  to  get  those  who  know 

13 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

them  best  to  allow  the  claim.  If  no 
man  is  a  hero  to  his  valet,  it  is  because 
the  valet  sees  him  in  those  hours  when 
he  drops  the  heroic  role.  Now  and 
then  a  man  may  persuade  enthusiastic 
follovvxrs,  who  never  see  him  except 
when  he  is  made  up  for  the  character 
and  acting  the  part,  that  he  is  a  saint ; 
but  it  is  more  difficult  to  get  his  wife, 
children  and  servants,  who  know  him 
M^hen  he  is  off  guard,  wearied  and 
vexed  with  trifles,  to  believe  in  his 
perfection.  The  marvel  about  Jesus 
is  that  they  who  knew  him  best  are 
they  who  published  his  claim  to  sin- 
lessness  as  true.  It  was  first  of  all 
the  circle  of  his  closest  disciples  and 
immediate  family, — those  who  saw 
him  weary,  sleepy,  hungry,  harassed 
with  life's  petty  cares,  and  the  victim 
of  petty  malice,  who  believed  that  he 
did  always  the  things  pleasing  to 
God. 

14 


JESUS    or    NAZARETH 

He  saw  and  interpreted  life  in 
terms  of  spiritual  relations.  To  him 
the  world  was  the  Father's  house. 
In  the  sunrise  and  the  falling  rain,  in 
the  springing  grass,  the  glory  of  the 
lily  and  the  feeding  birds  he  saw  the 
impartial  benevolence  of  God.  To 
him  the  whole  range  and  process  of 
life, — sowing  and  reaping,  making  of 
bread  and  giving  of  feasts,  care  of 
sheep,  fishing,  trading,  travelling, 
building,  and  ruling, — was  a  parable 
and  revelation  of  the  spiritual  laws 
and  forces  that  underlie  and  give 
meaning  to  the  visible  world.  At 
his  baptism  he  became  assured  that  he 
was  the  expepted  JNIessiah  of  the 
Jews,  sent  of  God  to  bring  deliver- 
ance to  his  people  and  to  found  the 
kingdom  of  God  on  earth.  But  he 
held  that  the  deliverance  the  nation 
needed  was  not  political  freedom 
from   Rome,    nor   military   mastery 

15 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

over  the  Gentiles;  but  to  be  freed 
from  sin  and  all  selfishness;  to  be 
released  from  greed,  bestiality,  envy 
and  cruelty;  to  be  made  kind  and 
helpful  to  all  men,  and  trustful  and 
obedient  toward  God.  His  task  he 
conceived  to  be  the  bringing  in  of  a 
kingdom  that  was  not  outward,  but 
the  essence  of  which  was  for  God's 
will  to  be  done  on  earth  as  it  is  in 
heaven. 


16 


CHAPTER  III. 

THE  ORIGINALITY  OF  HIS 
METHODS. 

We  have  seen  something  of  the 
originahty  of  Jesus'  character  and 
point  of  view.  They  prepare  us  for 
the  originahty  of  his  methods.  At 
the  outset  he  was  confronted  with 
temptations  to  take  an  unspiritual 
view  of  his  work.  Popular  patriot- 
ism demanded  pohtical  independence 
thru  a  successful  war,  and  a  splendid 
government  like  that  of  David  and 
Solomon.  It  was  expected  that  the 
Messiah  would  bring  immunity  from 
toil  for  daily  bread.  It  is  written 
in  the  Apocalypse  of  Baruch  that  in 

17 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

Messiah's  time  so  great  would  be  the 
fertility  of  Palestine's  limestone  hills 
that  every  vine  would  bear  a  thousand 
clusters,  and  every  cluster  a  thousand 
grapes,  and  every  grape  would  yield 
a  keg  of  wine.  The  ecclesiastical 
leaders  expected  the  Messiah  to 
usher  in  an  age  of  miraculous  por- 
tents to  satisfy  the  people's  love  of 
the  marvelous  and  to  give  proof  of 
his  divine  appointment.  "Signs  and 
bread"  was  the  Jewish  equivalent  of 
the  demand  of  the  idle  Roman  popu- 
lace for  "bread  and  circuses."  By 
feeding  and  amusing  the  populace, 
the  "lords  of  the  Gentiles"  were 
enabled  to  keep  their  dominion;  and 
if  Jesus  had  yielded  to  the  expecta- 
tions of  his  people,  if  he  had  turned 
the  stones  of  Palestine  into  bread  for 
them,  and  had  entertained  them  by 
such  marvels  as  leaping  from  the  roof 
of  the  temple  into  the  Kedron  valley 

18 


JESUS    OF    NAZAEETH 

and  returning  unharmed,  borne  up 
by  angels,  they  would  have  been  his 
servants.  But  Jesus  placed  no  reli- 
ance on  such  means.  Man  he  knew 
to  be  something  other  than  an  animal 
to  be  glutted  with  food,  something 
more  than  a  child  to  be  amused  with 
strange  trifles.  Nor  was  Jesus 
deceived  by  the  lesson  that  the  "king- 
doms of  the  world"  seemed  to  teach. 
Sargon  and  Nebuchadnezzar,  Cyrus, 
Alexander  and  Caesar  had  each  won 
world-empire  by  the  sword.  To 
adopt  their  method  seemed  the  only 
feasible  way  to  win  the  world  to  him- 
self and  God.  Before  such  a  temp- 
tation to  sacrifice  everything  for  the 
sake  of  easy,  immediate,  visible 
results,  INIohammed  afterwards  fell. 
After  he  had  tried  the  slow  method 
of  teaching  the  truth  as  he  saw  it, 
for  ten  years,  he  gave  up  reliance  on 
the  power  of  truth  and  took  to  the 

19 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

sword.  Before  this  temptation  the 
Medieval  Church  fell,  when  it  aban- 
doned the  attempt  to  convince  men 
of  the  truth  of  its  doctrines  by  the 
logic  of  argument  and  experience, 
and  resorted  to  the  sword  and  fagot 
to  win  and  hold  its  power.  But  here 
Jesus  did  not  fall.  His  originality 
lies  in  his  rejection  of  all  outward 
forces  and  his  reliance  on  the  power 
of  truth  and  self-sacrificing  love  to 
win  the  world.  But  was  it  the  origi- 
nality of  inspiration  or  the  eccen- 
tricity of  a  madman? 


30 


CHAPTER  IV. 

THE  REALITY  OF  SPIR- 
ITUAL CONQUEST. 

In  order  to  judge  of  the  character 
of  Jesus'  originality,  we  must  ascer- 
tain whether  it  be  true  to  human 
nature.  JModern  historical  study  has 
enabled  us  to  distinguish  between 
mihtary  conquest  and  spiritual  con- 
quest. Sometimes  the  two  go 
together,  and  in  such  cases  it  is  diffi- 
cult to  distinguish  them,  but  they  are 
not  identical  and  do  not  necessarily 
go  together.  The  ancient  Assyrians 
furnish  an  example  of  military  unac- 
companied by  spiritual  conquest. 
Their   military    prowess   has   rarely 

31 


JESUS    OF    NAZAEETH 

been  surpassed.  During  the  cen- 
turies of  their  power  they  were  uni- 
formly successful  as  besiegers  and 
conquerors,  but  they  were  unable  to 
reconcile  their  subjects  to  their 
dominion  or  win  them  to  Assyrian 
ideals.  Whenever  an  Assyrian  king 
died,  the  empire  dissolved  into  its  con- 
stituent peoples,  and  tho  for  centuries 
each  succeeding  monarch  was  able 
to  defeat  the  rebels  and  bring  them 
again  under  the  yoke,  they  could 
never  assuage  the  hate  of  their  sub- 
ject races.  They  only  succeeded  in 
rendering  it  impotent  by  deporting 
and  mixing  peoples  wholesale,  so  as 
to  kill  their  national  feelings  and 
aspirations.  Even  then  these  rem- 
nants never  became  loyal  to  the 
Assyrian  government.  Contrast  with 
this,  Alexander's  conquest  of  the 
Persian  empire.  He  not  only 
defeated  the  orientals  in  battle,  but 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

SO  enthused  them  with  loyalty  to  his 
own  ideals  of  a  world-empire  and 
with  love  of  the  Hellenic  culture  that 
he  represented,  that  when  his  Greek 
troops  mutinied  and  demanded  to  be 
led  back  to  Greece,  he  was  able  to 
quell  them  by  the  aid  of  the  Persian 
troops  whom  he  had  won  to  his  ideals 
and  inspired  with  loyalty  to  his  per- 
son, after  he  had  beaten  them  in  bat- 
tle. In  this  case  spiritual  conquest 
accompanied  military  conquest.  But 
history  tells  us  of  military  con- 
querors who  have  in  turn  been  con- 
quered by  the  spiritual  forces  of  the 
defeated  race.  It  is  a  commonplace 
of  history  how  the  Romans  went  to 
school  to  the  Greeks  after  they  had 
subdued  the  Hellenic  states  by  force 
of  arms ;  how  they  learned  language, 
philosophy,  and  art,  sitting  at  the  feet 
of  slaves  and  bowing  to  the  spiritual 
authority  of  their   subjects.     Like- 

23 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

wise  when  the  Germanic  tribes  had 
overthrown  the  Roman  empire,  so 
great  was  their  reverence  for  the 
rehgion,  culture,  and  ideals  of  justice 
of  Roman  civilization,  that  they  sub- 
jected themselves  to  the  spiritual 
power  of  Rome,  binding  thereto  both 
mind  and  conscience  for  the  thou- 
sand years  of  the  Middle  Age.  No 
lesson  of  history  is  clearer  than  that 
they  who  take  the  sword  and  rely 
upon  it  alone,  perish  by  the  sword. 
The  only  permanent  conquests  are 
those  made  in  the  realm  of  the  spirit 
by  love,  truth  or  justice;  and  it  was 
by  these,  without  the  confusion  and 
hindrances  which  armies  always  intro- 
duce into  the  process,  that  Jesus 
sought  to  conquer  the  world. 


34 


CHAPTER  V. 

KINGDOMS  FOUNDED  ON 

THE  UNSEEN. 

The  ultimate  basis  of  all  social 
organizations  is  spiritual.  Not  only 
the  kingdom  of  God  but  the  king- 
doms of  the  world  are  within  men, 
resting  on  inward  foundations.  It 
is  sometimes  asserted  that  the  ulti- 
mate appeal  of  government  is  to  mili- 
tary or  other  forms  of  physical  force. 
This  is  never  true.  The  ultimate 
appeal  of  governments  is  to  the 
loyalty  of  their  citizens,  or  at  least  to 
the  loyalty  of  the  military  or  some 
other  powerful  section  of  the  citizen- 
ship.    A  few  years  ago  when  Russia 

25 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

seemed  in  the  midst  of  a  revolu- 
tion the  crucial  question  finally  be- 
came whether  the  army  would  remain 
loyal.  Because  the  Cossacks  re- 
mained true  to  the  house  of  Roman- 
off, the  Russian  autocracy  remains. 
Napoleon  could  conquer  Europe 
with  his  legions  only  after  he  had 
won  them  by  other  than  physical 
force  to  fight  for  him.  If  by  the 
magnetism  of  his  personality  and  the 
spell  of  his  genius  Napoleon  could 
get  a  half -million  men  to  follow  him 
even  to  death,  why  should  it  be 
unthinkable  that  Jesus  should  get  the 
world  by  similar  means  to  become 
and  remain  subjects  of  his  kingdom? 
Such  were  the  foundations  Jesus 
laid  for  his  kingdom,  and  he  would 
not  seek  to  augment  his  power,  nor 
risk  its  stability  by  assuming  the  out- 
ward forms  and  buttresses  of  king- 
ship.    In  a  hereditary  monarchy,  the 

26 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

hereditary  king  may  be  lacking  in 
kingly  qualities,  so  that  he  needs  the 
paraphernalia    of    royalty    to    hide 
his  lack  of  kingly  person  and  char- 
acter, and  to  secure  that  homage  and 
obedience   which   men   yield   to   the 
ideal  of  order  and  justice  for  which 
the   throne   and   scepter    stand,   but 
which  his  person  could  not  inspire. 
But  the  true  kingly  person  does  not 
need  such  aids  and  disguises,  and  so 
Jesus  sought  to  become  king  of  men, 
without   robe    or    crown,    throne    or 
scepter,  by  the  sheer  force  of  his  per- 
sonality, by  the  convincing  power  of 
his  teaching  and  the  winning  power 
of  his  love.     By  such  means  would  he 
win  his  kingdom  and  on  such  a  basis 
let  it  rest.     It  was  his  trust  in  the  suf- 
ficiency of  these  that  made  him  seem 
so  utterly  careless  of  the  future  of 
his   movement.      He   neglected   the 
ordinary  means  on  which  men  rely  to 

87 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

propagate  or  buttress  a  cause.  He 
wrote  no  book,  accumulated  no 
wealth,  formed  no  government, 
organized  no  church.  He  came  to 
cast  fire  upon  the  earth  and  needed 
nothing  more  after  it  had  kindled. 
Against  the  world's  hoary  bulwarks 
of  evil  he  set  the  blazing  passion  of 
his  cross,  and  having  seen  the  flame 
kindle  in  his  disciples,  he  went  his 
way  sure  that  he  had  overcome  the 
world.  He  planted  his  kingdom  as 
seed  and  leaven  in  the  hearts  of  men, 
confident  of  the  vital  power  of  its 
truth  and  love  to  grow  and  fructify 
in  the  soil  of  humanity,  assured  that 
it  would  permeate  and  transform  the 
world.  The  power  of  an  idea,  or  a 
resolution,  or  a  passion  to  make  his- 
tory and  to  change  and  determine 
destiny  is  a  commonplace  of  our 
thinking  to-day,  but  with  Jesus  it  was 
the  daring  of  genius,  the  insight  of 

28 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

inspiration.  Thus  we  reach  one 
measure  of  the  greatness  of  Jesus,  as 
we  see  how  far  he  surpassed  his  con- 
temporaries in  insight,  and  realize 
how  great  was  the  faith  required  to 
adopt  such  a  plan  in  the  face  of  the 
world's  skepticism  and  hostility;  how 
faring  the  courage  to  hold  it  fast  even 
in  the  seeming  failure  of  the  end. 


89 


CHAPTER  VI. 

THE  SURVIVAL  OF  THE 
TRUE. 

Let  us  now  consider  Jesus'  teach- 
ing. It  was  as  a  teacher  that  he  was 
most  commonly  known  and  it  was 
thru  his  teaching  mainly  that  he 
sought  to  accomplish  his  work.  We 
may  apply  to  his  teaching  the  test  of 
survival.  The  doctrine  of  the  sur- 
vival of  the  fittest  means,  in  a  general 
way,  that  the  organisms,  which  are 
best  fitted  to  meet  the  conditions 
imposed  upon  them  by  their  environ- 
ment, will  survive  and  perpetuate 
themselves.  In  this  way  survival 
becomes  a  test  of  truth,  in  so  far  as 
so 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

by  truth  we  mean  conformity  to  the 
conditions  under  which  an  organism 
exists.  There  are  many  things,  for 
example,  that  limit  the  possibility  of 
growing  apple-trees  successfully  in 
our  country.  The  varieties  that  sur- 
vive are  those  that  are  able  to  with- 
stand our  severe  winters,  dry  sum- 
mers, and  numerous  insect  pests. 
Varieties  that  are  not  able  to  resist 
these  successfully  die  out.  Conse- 
quently the  fact  that  a  given  variety 
of  apple  is  successfully  grown  here 
is  proof  of  its  adjustment  to  these 
conditions.  The  buck's  horn,  to  take 
another  illustration,  is  a  weed  that 
thrives  in  the  clover  fields,  because  of 
its  admirable  fitness  for  life  under  the 
conditions  found  there.  It  grows 
about  the  height  of  the  clover,  and 
springs  and  seeds  as  quickly  after 
mowing.  Its  seed  is  so  near  the 
color,  size  and  weight  of  the  clover- 
si 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

seed  that  it  is  nearly  impossible  to 
pick,  screen,  or  blow  it  out.  Turn- 
ing to  forms  of  human  society  we 
may  apply  the  same  principles,  for 
forms  of  human  society  follow  the 
laws  of  organic  life.  That  form  of 
human  society,  whether  economic, 
political,  or  religious,  will  last  longest 
and  be  most  vigorous,  which  is  most 
in  accord  with  the  deep  and  abiding 
traits  of  human  nature  and  with  the 
spiritual  and  moral  laws  of  the  world. 
That  organization  will  be  most  last- 
ing which  is  based  on  the  forces  that 
are  most  powerful  to  move  and  hold 
men.  Consequently  we  may  apply 
to  Jesus'  teaching  concerning  the 
kingdom  of  God  the  test  of  survival, 
and  by  this  means  determine  whether 
it  be  true  to  spiritual  realities. 


CHAPTER  VII. 
THE  UNIVERSAL  FAMILY. 

Jesus  taught  that  in  the  family  at 

its  best  are  found  the  truest  relations 

of   human   beings   to   each   other, — 

truest  to  their  best  nature  and  most 

permanent     needs;     for    when    we 

examine  his  teaching  carefully,   his 

kingdom  of  God  turns  out  to  be  a 

universal  family.     God  stands  to  its 

members  as  their  Father.     Men  are 

to    act    toward    God    as    sons,    and 

toward  each  other  as  brothers.     The 

motives  that  rule  in  his  kingdom  are 

those    of    the    family    stript    of   its 

limitations  of  kin  and  blood :  perfect 

trust     and     obedience    toward     the 


33 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

Father,  and  unselfish  love  and  help- 
fulness toward  one  another;  for  not 
competition  but  self-denying  love  is 
the  law  of  family  life.  The  strong 
brother,  if  he  be  a  true  brother,  shares 
the  gains  of  his  superior  strength 
with  the  weakling;  and  the  principle 
of  self-denial  which  Jesus  made 
fundamental  in  his  ideal  character 
is  the  basal  law  of  parenthood. 

To  the  family,  then, — the  one 
human  institution  which  is  in  any 
large  degree  founded  on  the  princi- 
ples of  Jesus'  kingdom, — we  may 
apply  directly  the  test  of  survival, 
and  thus  determine  in  some  degree, 
how  far  its  relations  and  motives  are 
true  to  human  nature.  We  find  that 
the  family  is  the  fundamental  form 
of  all  social  life  and  the  most  endur- 
ing one.  Individualism  is  never  the 
first  condition  of  life.  One  is  a 
member    of    a    family    first,    and 

34 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

becomes  a  separate  individual  only  by 
reason  of  the  gifts  of  the  family. 
Out  of  it  by  expansion,  as  in  the 
patriarchal  family  and  in  racial 
nations  and  religions,  or  by  covenant 
or  conquest  grow  the  larger  organ- 
izations, such  as  nations,  churches, 
and  economic  corporations.  These 
organizations,  founded  on  some 
other  principles  than  those  which 
regulate  the  family  and  hold  it 
together,  come  and  go  on  the  stage 
of  history,  but  the  family  remains 
fundamentally  the  same.  Physical 
force,  law  and  penalty,  individual 
rights  and  freedom,  or  commercial 
interests  have  never  proven  so  true  to 
the  nature  and  needs  of  man  as  to  be 
able  to  make  the  institutions  founded 
on  them  permanent.  Nay,  more! 
Other  institutions  are  able  to  main- 
tain themselves  while  they  last  largely 
by  the  aid  of  the  reserve  power  of 

35 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

the  family  motives.  A  tottering 
nation  seeks  to  support  itself  by  ap- 
pealing to  its  citizens'  love  of  home, 
and  recruits  its  armies  in  crises  from 
those  to  whom  patriotism  means  the 
defense  of  hearth  and  family.  The 
church  feels  secure  as  long  as  its  roots 
are  in  the  home;  as  long  as  fathers 
and  mothers  are  its  recruiting  agents. 
It  makes  its  strongest  appeals  to 
family  interests,  when  it  exhorts  a 
man  to  be  religious  in  order  to  pre- 
serve the  family  name  from  disgrace ; 
in  order  to  be  true  to  parents'  hopes 
or  worthy  of  a  woman's  love,  or  pre- 
pared to  meet  the  loved  and  lost  in  the 
life  beyond  the  grave.  On  the  other 
hand,  that  church  or  nation  which  at- 
tacks the  family  with  monastic  ideals 
or  communistic  practices  is  doomed 
early  to  perish.  Judged  by  its  power 
to  survive,  the  family  is  truest  to  the 
spiritual  nature  and  needs  of  man. 

36 


JESUS    OF    XAZARETH 

And  this  fact  sets  the  seal  of  truth 
upon  Jesus'  teaching  that  the  ideal 
and  eternal  form  of  human  society 
will  be  attained  in  the  relations  of  a 
universal  family. 


3T 


CHAPTER  VIII. 

THE  HISTORICAL  BASIS  IN 
THE  FAMILY  OF  ISRAEL. 

In  another  way  we  may  apply  the 
test  of  survival.  Ideas  and  institu- 
tions are  most  likely  to  prove  true 
and  lasting  which  have  a  definite 
basis  in  history.  Men  cannot  go  up 
into  the  mount  of  speculation  for 
something  entirely  new  and  detached 
from  previous  experience,  and  then 
bring  down  such  a  pattern  and  make 
it  live  and  work  among  men.  The 
best  that  can  be  done  is  to  advance  a 
step  along  the  line  of  past  achieve- 
ments or  try  on  a  universal  scale 
something  worked   out  by   a   small 

38 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

people  or  in  a  limited  field.  The  con- 
stitution of  the  United  States  has 
worked  so  well  because  the  framers 
of  it  kept  so  closely  to  the  principles 
and  forms  developed  by  the  English 
people  in  their  long  progress  toward 
popular  government,  and  found 
practicable  by  the  colonists  in  the 
freer  conditions  of  life  in  America. 
It  gives  confidence,  therefore,  in  the 
teaching  of  Jesus,  when  we  find  that 
it  rests  solidly  upon  the  history  and 
religious  development  of  the  Jewish 
people;  that  he  himself  consciously 
undertook  but  a  larger  fulfilment, 
not  a  destruction,  of  that  w^hich  had 
gone  before.  We  find  that  the  Jews 
were  in  many  senses  a  family  nation. 
More  than  any  other  civilized  people, 
unless  it  be  the  Chinese,  family  loy- 
alty dominated  them.  Even  Solomon 
could  not  obliterate  their  tribal  dis- 
tinctions in  the  interest  of  a  firmer 

39 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

national  organization.  Their  national 
consciousness  was  that  they  were  the 
children  of  Abraham  and  Israel. 
They  thought  in  the  categories  of 
family  relations.  The  suburbs  of 
Jerusalem  were  her  "daughters."  A 
peaceable  man  was  a  "son  of  peace;" 
a  wise  man,  a  "son  of  wisdom."  Jew- 
ish ethics,  as  interpreted  by  their 
greatest  teachers,  the  prophets,  were 
the  virtues  and  obligations  of  the 
family  enlarged  in  scope;  and  they 
expressed  their  religion  in  the  lan- 
guage of  the  family.  Jehovah  was 
to  them  the  husband  or  father  of  the 
nation.  The  covenant  which  w^as  the 
beginning  of  their  religion  was  the 
people's  betrothal  to  Jehovah;  and 
their  sins  were  unfaithfulness  and 
adultery  toward  Him. 

The  world's  master  thinkers  and 
writers  are  such  because  in  them  the 
truth,  worked  out  in  some  great  epoch 

40 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

of  human  history,  has  found  perman- 
ent artistic  expression.  Thus  Homer 
immortahzed  the  hfe  and  spirit  of 
the  early  Hellenes;  Dante  expressed 
in  his  Divine  Comedy  the  dominating 
beliefs  of  the  Middle  Ages;  Shakes- 
peare became  the  poet  of  English 
Feudalism;  and  Milton,  of  the  Ren- 
aissance Puritanism.  Thus  Goethe's 
Faust  expresses  in  classic  form  the 
noble,  but  wild  unrest  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century.  In  like  manner 
Jesus'  teaching  as  to  the  kingdom  of 
God  rests  upon  the  historic  basis  of 
Jewish  life  and  ideals.  The  prin- 
ciples that  held  the  Jews  together  he 
extended  to  include  all  men.  Altho 
the  Jews  would  not  follow  him  into 
this  universal  fellowship;  altho  they 
could  not  entertain  the  idea  of  ad- 
mitting the  hated  Gentiles  to  share 
the  blessings  of  the  family  and  God 
of  Abraham,  think  how  their  limited 

41 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

adoption  of  the  principles  of  family 
life  among  themselves  has  given  per- 
manency to  their  race !  One  would  not 
expect  to  find  to-day  a  living  member 
of  one  of  the  nations  that  were 
neighbors  to  the  ancient  Hebrews. 
Where  would  one  look  to-day  for  an 
Edomite,  Assyrian,  or  Philistine? 
Yet  you  may  find  on  the  street  to-day 
in  almost  any  city  of  the  world  the 
hooked  nose  and  olive  complexion  of 
the  pure-blooded  Jew.  For  two 
thousand  years  the  Jews  have  main- 
tained their  numbers  and  racial 
identity,  without  the  asylum  of  a 
common  country,  deprived  of  the 
protection  of  a  political  government, 
exposed  to  the  religious  hate  and 
covetous  envy  of  their  Gentile  neigh- 
bors, scattered  among  nations  that 
have  afflicted  and  robbed  them.  If 
their  partial  realization  of  the  rela- 
tions and  motives  which  Jesus  taught 

4S 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

has  thus  enabled  them  to  survive,  how 
true  must  these  be  to  the  nature  of 
man,  and  how  much  more  might  we 
expect  the  kingdom  of  Jesus  to  be 
eternal! 


43 


CHAPTER  IX. 

THE  ABILITY  TO 
CONVINCE. 

In  a  third  way  we  may  apply  the 
test  of  survival  to  the  teaching  of 
Jesus.  We  may  judge  of  its  truth 
bj^  its  ability  to  stand  the  test  of 
criticism  and  win  the  assent  of  men. 
Euclid's  geometrical  propositions  are 
still  held  to  be  true,  because  his  rea- 
soning and  his  demonstrations  have 
always  convinced  men  that  his  propo- 
sitions are  true  to  the  laws  of  thought 
and  to  the  relations  of  objects  in 
space.  In  a  similar  way  the  teach- 
ing of  Jesus  has  secured  the  assent 
of  men.    This  is  the  element  of  truth 

44 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

in  the  Roman  Church's  test  of 
"universality."  It  is  not  a  test  that 
can  be  apphed  in  any  limited  fashion. 
Prophets  and  geniuses  are  usually  so 
far  in  advance  of  their  age  that  they 
are  but  partially  recognized  as  her- 
alds of  truth.  Great  thinkers  and 
teachers  have  too  often  to  appeal 
from  the  judgment  of  their  own 
generation  to  that  of  generations  to 
come.  On  the  other  hand  a  too  lim- 
ited application  of  the  principle  might 
seem  to  prove  the  truth  of  any  system 
of  belief  that  obtains  wide  accept- 
ance, such  as  Mohammedanism  or 
Medieval  demonology.  Yet  even  in 
such  cases  as  these  the  principle  holds 
in  part,  since  no  conception  ever  ob- 
tains wide  acceptance  among  men 
that  does  not  contain  large  elements 
of  truth,  which,  rather  than  its  limita- 
tions and  errors,  secure  its  acceptance. 
The  real  value  of  the  test  proposed 

45 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

is  expressed  in  Abraham  Lincoln's 
famous  saying  that  it  is  impossible 
"to  fool  all  the  people  all  the  time." 
In  spite  of  the  fact  that  Jesus'  own 
generation  largely  rejected  him,  he 
has  been  able  to  convince  men  of  all 
ages  who  have  given  his  teachings 
candid  thought  and  have  tested  it  in 
the  laboratory  of  spiritual  experience. 
This  is  all  the  more  wonderful  since 
he  never  formulated  his  message  into 
a  system  nor  wrote  it  out  in  a  treatise. 
He  dropped  his  teaching  in  discon- 
nected discourses  among  the  multi- 
tudes or  uttered  it  in  fragmentary 
form  in  parables  and  proverbs,  which 
were  preserved  only  in  the  recollec- 
tions of  his  disciples.  Yet  in  this  form 
it  has  stood  the  test  of  the  most  care- 
ful scrutiny  for  two  thousand  years; 
by  minds  both  candid  and  hostile ;  by 
minds  as  diverse  and  keen  as  the 
Greeks,  Romans,  Medieval  scholas- 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

tics,  and  modern  scientific  scholars. 
Its  truth  and  convincing  power  were 
never  better  shown  than  in  the  fact 
that  to-day  the  cry  of  the  world's 
scholarship,  understanding  as  it  does, 
the  teaching  of  Jesus  more  thor- 
oughly than  any  previous  age,  is 
"Back  to  Christ." 


47 


CHAPTER  X. 

THE  SATISFACTION  OF 

PERMANENT  HUMAN 

NEEDS, 

Let  us  apply  still  another  test  to 
the  teaching  of  Jesus, — the  satisfac- 
tion of  permanent  human  needs.  Mr. 
Balfour  in  his  "Foundations  of 
Belief"  lays  this  down  as  one  of  the 
fundamental  bases  of  belief.  We  be- 
lieve those  things  to  be  true,  he  main- 
tains, which  in  practical  life  bring  us 
the  satisfaction  of  our  needs.  In 
spite  of  theoretic  difficulties  we  hold 
fast  to  those  ideas  which  work  in 
practise;  and  on  the  other  hand,  no 
theory,  however  plausible  it  may  be 

48 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

from  a  speculative  point  of  view,  is 
seriously  accepted  as  true  unless 
those  who  act  upon  it  find  that  it 
brings  them  into  harmonious  contact 
with  reality. 

The  history  of  human  thought  is 
filled  with  the  names  of  men  who  have 
won  distinction  by  giving  clear  ex- 
pression to  some  phase  of  truth  as  it 
appeared  to  their  own  age,  but  whose 
opinions  have  proven  false  or  inade- 
quate in  the  experience  of  succeeding 
ages.  Others  there  are  who  have  so 
thoroughly  grasped  some  vital  truth 
and  given  it  so  exact  a  statement  that 
it  answers  for  all  ages.  To  which 
class  does  Jesus  belong?  There  are 
those  who  assert  that  the  unique  value 
of  Jesus'  teaching  passed  away  with 
the  progress  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury; that  the  new  thought-world  in 
which  we  live  has  out-dated  him.  The 
case    is    stated    somewhat    in    these 

49 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

terms:  We  live  in  a  world  very  dif- 
ferent from  that  assumed  in  his 
teaching.  We  no  longer  regard  the 
earth  as  flat  nor  as  the  central  body 
in  the  universe.  We  have  outgrown 
the  superstitious  belief  in  angels  and 
devils  which  he  shared  with  his  Jew-, 
ish  contemporaries.  Jewish  Messian- 
ism  with  its  cataclysmic  ideas  of 
history,  its  crass  and  artificial  notions 
of  spiritual  events,  its  other-worldli- 
ness  and  supernaturalism,  is  a  dead 
system  of  thought;  yet  it  is  the  sys- 
tem which  is  presupposed  in  his 
teaching.  Even  the  Greek  philoso- 
phy in  terms  of  which  his  followers 
first  interpreted  him  and  his  message 
to  the  non-Jewish  world  is  no  longer 
regarded  as  an  adequate  expression 
of  truth.  A  new  world  has  dawned 
upon  the  minds  of  men,  of  which 
Jesus  never  thought,  much  less 
taught ;  and  with  this  new  world  there 

50 


JESUS    OF    X  A  Z  A  R  E  T  H 

has  come  a  host  of  new  problems 
about  which  he  had  nothing  to  say 
and  in  which  he  can  give  the  world 
no  help.  JNIoreover,  we  are  told,  it 
is  absurd  to  think  that  a  peasant  of 
ancient  Judea,  an  unlettered  man 
from  one  of  the  least  significant  pro- 
vinces of  the  ancient  world  should  be 
the  ideal  person,  and  the  teacher  of 
final  truth  to  the  twentieth  century. 
This  view  demands  our  careful 
attention.  From  its  consideration  we 
may,  first  of  all,  eliminate  the 
matters  of  time,  place,  and  size. 
Truth  and  character  are  spiritual 
realities  and  therefore  not  to  be 
measured  in  terms  of  space  and  time, 
albeit  we  Americans  are  sometimes 
tempted  to  believe  that  bigness  may 
make  up  for  deficiencies  of  character 
or  truth.  Whether  a  hog  existed 
yesterday  or  two  thousand  years  ago 
has  nothing  to  do  with  its  hoggish- 

51 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

ness;  nor  would  it  change  its  char- 
acter for  it  to  be  the  size  of  an 
elephant.  Nero  is  neither  more  nor 
less  of  a  tyrannical  character  because 
he  was  tyrant  of  the  Roman  world 
instead  of  tyrant  of  Syracuse.  The 
size  of  a  country  has  nothing  to  do 
with  the  truth  of  a  man's  teaching 
who  happens  to  be  born  in  it.  Greece 
and  Holland  are  not  much  larger 
than  Judea;  yet  no  one  has  seen  fit 
to  doubt  the  correctness  of  Phidias' 
art  nor  to  discount  Grotius'  princi- 
ples of  international  law  because 
these  men  lived  in  time  long  past  or 
in  countries  so  small.  Senor  Barbossa 
of  Brazil,  in  an  eloquent  plea  for  the 
right  of  small  nations  to  furnish 
judges  for  the  world's  court  at  the 
Hague,  calls  attention  to  the  fact 
that  the  greatest  lawgivers  of  the 
world,  Moses  and  Solon,  came  from 
among  little  peoples.     The  greatest 

52 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

contributions  to  the  underlying  prin- 
ciples of  our  civilization  have  been 
made  by  four  small  countries  and 
mostly  in  ancient  times — Judea, 
Greece,  the  city  of  Rome,  and  Eng- 
land. The  question  of  the  truth  of 
a  man's  teaching  must  be,  then,  not 
one  of  time,  place,  or  size,  but  one  of 
fact.  We  must  ask,  "Did  this  man 
tell  the  world  the  relations  of  things 
as  they  are?  Did  he  show  men  the 
permanent  laws  and  forces  of  life?'* 
Some  things  are  true  in  one  genera- 
tion, which  are  not  true  in  another, 
because  in  the  progress  of  history  the 
facts  change.  A  teacher  who  calls 
attention  to  such  things  is  not  a  per- 
manent teacher  of  men,  except  as  the 
historian  of  an  order  that  has  passed 
away.  Other  things  are  as  perman- 
ent as  the  universe  itself,  and  those 
who  discover  and  proclaim  these  per- 
manent realities  are  teachers  of  all 

53 


JESL'S    OF    XAZAEETH 

ages.  To  the  latter  class  belongs 
Euclid.  He  set  forth  the  relations  of 
lines  and  points  in  space  as  they  are; 
and  until  the  constitution  of  the  uni- 
verse changes  so  that  these  relations 
are  no  longer  as  he  taught  them,  he 
will  remain  the  world's  final  teacher 
of  geometry,  as  far  as  his  teaching 
goes.  To  which  class  does  Jesus  be- 
long ?  Did  he  tell  the  truths  concern- 
ing man's  relations  to  man  and  to 
God  as  they  are  ideally  and  etern- 
ally? Did  he  show  the  unchanging 
laws  and  forces  of  the  spiritual  life? 
Have  the  relations  and  needs  of  men 
so  changed  in  the  twentieth  centun*- 
that  his  teaching  is  no  longer  true  to 
the  facts  nor  satisfj-ing  to  man's 
spiritual  needs? 

It  must  be  recognized  at  the  outset 
that  Jesus  did  not  give  teaching 
about  a  host  of  problems  which  we 
find  of  interest.    Modem  philosophy 

54 


JESrS    OF    NAZARETH 

raises  the  question  of  the  existence 
and  character  of  the  *'thing-in-itseir' 
apart  from  our  apprehension  of  it, 
Jesus  never  considered  the  question. 
Xone  of  his  recorded  utterances  dis- 
cusses problems  of  Old  Testament 
criticism.  He  does  not  tell  us  the 
date  of  Deuteronomy,  tlie  author  of 
Job,  or  whether  Jonah  is  a  history  or 
a  parable.  Is  a  monarchy  or  a  demo- 
cracy the  right  form  of  government  ? 
What  proportion  of  the  gains  of  in- 
dustry- sliould  go  to  capital  and  what 
to  labor  .^  Are  tlie  nebular  hypo- 
thesis and  theory  of  organic  evolu- 
tion true?  Jesus  does  not  tell  us. 
But  while  he  does  not  give  answers  to 
so  majiy  of  the  pn^blems  tliat  press 
for  solution  upon  the  modern  mind, 
he  does,  nevertheless,  speak  of  those 
things  that  still  constitute  the  great 
interests  and  minister  to  tlie  supreme 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

needs  of  modern  life.*  If  the  scholar 
of  the  twentieth  century  may  not  go 
to  him  to  solve  problems  of  nature 
and  history,  he  does  still  need  to 
learn  from  him  the  spirit  that  should 
actuate  him  in  his  work  and  deter- 
mine his  attitude  to  his  fellows.  Too 
often  the  halls  of  learning  resound 
with  acrimonious  debates,  with  sel- 
fish claims  of  priority  of  discovery, 
and  with  bitter  charges  of  dishonest 
methods.  Too  often  we  find  men 
pursuing  the  world's  mysteries  with 
irreverent  feet,  bent  on  gain  or  fame, 
with  little  thought  of  the  good  of 
men  or  the  praise  of  God.  The  world 
of  scholarship  has  not  outgrown  the 
need  to  sit  at  Jesus'  feet  and  learn 
the  lessons  of  unselfish  devotion  to 
truth,  of  humility,  and  of  love.  Jesus 
gave   no   teaching  on  the   economic 


*  Maoh  of  the  rest  of  thia  sectiou  was  suggested 
J)y  Schmidt,  The  Prophet  of  Nazareth,  Chapter  XIV. 

56 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

laws  of  wealth  and  its  accumulation; 
but  he  does  teach  the  truth  which  the 
modern  world  so  sorely  needs  to 
know, — that  it  does  not  pay  to  sacri- 
fice one's  higher  self  to  gain  even  the 
whole  wealth  of  the  world.  Jesus 
does  not  prescribe  one  form  of  gov- 
ernment as  best  for  men;  but  he 
does  teach  by  precept  and  example 
that  governments  must  exist  for  the 
common  good,  and  that  those  who 
rule  must  serve.  Jesus  does  not  give 
rules  for  fixing  the  prices  men  may 
charge  for  the  output  of  the  fac- 
tories ;  but  he  does  assert  the  supreme 
worth  of  the  men,  women  and  chil- 
dren who  tend  the  machines.  He 
WTote  no  treatise,  to  be  sure,  on  the 
construction  of  ships  or  the  operation 
of  a  wireless  telegraph;  but  he  does 
tell  us  what  we  still  need  to  be 
taught,  that  the  ship  when  built  must 
go  on  errands  of  mercy,  not  of  de- 

57 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

struction;  that  the  message  sent  by 
^vireless  must  be  a  message  of  justice 
and  love,  not  one  of  hate  or  war. 
With  all  modern  discoveries  and 
achievements  in  medicine  and  sur- 
gery,— splendid  and  beneficent  as 
they  are, — men  have  discovered  no 
surgery  for  a  broken  heart,  no  balm 
for  a  sin-sick  soul,  no  antidote  for 
sensuality's  creeping  death  other 
than  those  taught  by  the  great  soul- 
physician  of  Nazareth.  And  while 
human  nature  remains  what  it  is  and 
has  been  since  recorded  history  began, 
as  long  as  men  love  and  hate,  sin  and 
repent,  and  feel  after  God,  so  long 
will  the  teaching  of  Jesus  be  needed 
to  show  them  that  God  Is  not  far 
from  any  and  to  point  out  the  way  to 
Him.  As  long  as  God  and  the  soul 
endure  as  they  are,  so  long  will  Jesus 
remain  the  satisfier  of  the  soul's 
needs,  the  final  spiritual  teacher  of 
the  world. 

58 


CHAPTER  XI. 

THE  HEIGHT  OF  THE 
PEDESTAL. 

Let  us  now  turn  from  the  teach- 
ing to  the  personahty  of  Jesus. 
Christianity  has  always  made  him 
rather  than  his  teaching  alone  central 
in  its  thought.  What  value  must  we 
attach  to  his  personality  as  a  force  in 
history?  Is  his  teaching  incidental  to 
his  chara.cter  or  an  essential  expres- 
sion of  it?  How  shall  we  account  for 
him  as  a  figure  and  force  in  history? 

In  order  to  get  a  true  estimate  of 
his  personal  power,  it  is  needful  to 
distinguish  between  it  and  the  advan- 
tage given  him  by  the  historical  set- 

59 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

ting  of  his  life.  Sometimes  in 
approaching  a  city  or  park  one 
catches  a  ghmpse  of  a  statue  over- 
topping the  trees  or  houses.  Often 
it  is  impossible  to  tell  how  tall  the 
figure  really  is  until  one  can  see  the 
pedestal  on  which  it  stands;  for  the 
apparent  height  may  be  due  in  reality 
to  the  height  of  the  pedestal.  So  in 
determining  the  actual  greatness  of 
an  historic  character  one  must  know 
first  of  all  how  much  of  his  ap- 
parent greatness  and  power  are 
due  to  his  environment  and  other 
favoring  circumstances.  Attention 
has  already  been  called  to  the  rela- 
tive insignificance  of  the  country 
of  Jesus.  Judea  was  lacking  in 
nearly  all  those  resources  which 
enable  a  people  to  play  an  influential 
part  in  history.  A  little  backbone  of 
limestone  mountains  stretching  be- 
tween   a    harborless    coast    and    an 

60 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

impassable  desert,  without  great 
rivers,  without  population  sufficient 
to  form  a  conquering  army,  without 
mineral  or  agricultural  resources,  its 
capital  a  mere  mountain  fortress  "on 
the  road  to  nowhere,"  it  had  little 
chance  to  furnish  one  of  its  citizens 
with  resources,  either  militarj'-,  politi- 
cal, or  economic,  with  which  to  influ- 
ence the  world.*  Had  Alexander 
been  born  in  Abyssinia,  awaj^  from 
Greek  culture  and  Philip's  phalanx, 
what  likelihood  is  there  that  he  would 
be  called  great?  If  Napoleon  had 
been  a  citizen  of  some  petty  native 
province  of  India  at  the  foot  of  the 
Himalayas  on  the  far  frontier  of  the 
British  Empire,  how  much  chance 
would  he  have  had  to  play  the  part 
he  did  or  any  great  part  in  the  history 
of  civilization  ?  Yet  in  such  a  despised 


•See  G.  A.  Smith,  The  Historical  Geography   of 
the  Holy  Land. 

61 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

province  on  the  far  frontier  of  the 
Roman  Empire  Jesus  was  born. 
What  he  accomplished  was  achieved 
without  any  of  the  usual  aids  to 
power.  He  had  neither  wealth, 
learning,  political  organization,  nor 
army  with  which  to  impress  the  world. 
In  outward  significance  his  life  was 
like  the  mustard  seed  of  his  own  par- 
able. An  obscure  peasant  of  Gali- 
lee,— ^regarded  as  provincial  even  by 
his  OAvn  nation, — he  taught  a  few 
years,  chiefly  in  the  outlying  districts 
of  Palestine;  gathered  a  few  fisher- 
folk  about  him,  who  dreamed  he  was 
the  Messiah  that  so  persistently 
haunted  the  hopes  of  this  strange 
people;  aroused  a  transient  interest 
among  the  Jews  by  his  strange  teach- 
ing and  reputed  cures;  incurred  the 
hate  and  fear  of  the  rulers  and  lead- 
ers by  his  opposition  to  the  conven- 
tional religion  and  by  his  sporadic 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

popularity,  and  was  put  to  death  in 
disgraceful  fashion  by  the  conniv- 
ance of  Jewish  and  Roman  authori- 
ties. If  such  a  one  made  any 
impression  on  the  world,  it  was  by  the 
sheer  force  of  his  personality  and  by 
the  weight  of  his  teaching. 

There  is  one  scene  in  his  life  that 
makes  his  independence  of  circum- 
stances stand  out  with  peculiar  force. 
It  was  after  the  multitudes  had 
turned  away  from  him  because  he 
refused  to  be  forced  into  a  jNIessianic 
revolution  just  after  the  feeding  of 
the  five  thousand  near  Capernaum. 
Pie  had  retired  to  the  neighborhood 
of  Caesarea  Philippi  with  his  twelve 
disciples,  tho  still  uncertain  of  their 
loyalty.  Here  he  finally  dared  ask 
them  whom  they  believed  him  to  be; 
and  there  Peter,  for  them  all,  con- 
fessed they  still  held  him  to  be  the 
^Messiah,    the    Son    of    the    Living 

63 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

God.  Hard  by  where  this  confession 
was  made,  stood  the  marble  temple 
in  honor  of  Augustus  which  Herod 
Philip  had  erected  to  his  imperial 
patron.*  Well  might  the  provincials 
of  the  empire  worship  the  numen  of 
the  emperor,  for  he  seemed  to  them 
greater  than  their  old  national  deities 
had  been  thought  to  be.  He  had  the 
gifts  of  peace  and  justice  and  pros- 
perity, the  power  of  life  and  death  in 
his  hands.  Which  of  these  think  j^ou 
as  you  watch  the  scene,  is  the  greater, 
the  more  divine:  Augustus,  the 
founder  of  the  world-wide  empire, 
with  all  power  in  his  hands  and  all 
things  in  his  gift,  the  incarnation 
of  the  world's  ideal  of  peace,  order, 
and  law,  whom  the  provincials  wor- 
ship in  the  marble  temple  as  the 
greatest  manifestation  they  know  of 
divine  power?     Or  Jesus  of  Naza- 

*  G.  A,  Smith,  Hist.  Geography  of  the  Holy  Land. 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

reth,  without  power  of  office  or  place, 
fleeing  from  the  indifference  and 
hostihty  of  his  own  people,  alone 
except  for  the  little  band  of  unlet- 
tered Galileans  who  still  think  him 
the  Messiah  of  God?  Which  will  be 
most  potent  five  centuries  afterward, 
the  empire  of  Caesar  or  the  kingdom 
of  Jesus?  Certainly  there  is  no 
promise  in  the  outward  circumstances 
of  that  scene  that  Jesus  will  supplant 
Caesar  on  the  world's  throne.  Yet 
you  know,  student  of  history,  that 
when  three  centuries  had  passed,  cen- 
turies of  struggle  even  unto  blood 
between  the  followers  of  the  Christ 
and  the  soldiers  of  Caesar,  Constan- 
tine  sat  upon  the  imperial  throne  with 
the  labarum  over  him,  and  that  he 
was  placed  there  by  the  followers  of 
Jesus.  And  when  five  centuries  had 
passed  the  bishop  of  Rome  exercised 
in  the  name  of  Jesus,  the  authority 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

of  the  Caesars  after  their  dominion 
had  perished.  What  was  there  in 
Jesus  that,  tho  dead,  he  should  thus 
rule  the  world  on  the  ruins  of 
Caesar's  throne!  Whatever  it  was 
that  gave  him  such  power,  it  was  not 
the  pedestal  on  which  he  stood. 


66 


CHAPTER  XII. 

THE  MEASURE  OF  A  MAN. 

Next  in  our  endeavor  to  get  a  true 
estimate  of  Jesus'  personality,  let  us 
apply  to  him  the  measure  of  a  man. 
When  looking  at  a  photograph  of  an 
ancient  statue,  it  is  difficult  to  get  a 
correct  idea  of  its  size  unless  one 
knows  the  scale  and  perspective  of 
the  picture.  It  is  common  in  photo- 
graphing such  an  object  to  have  a 
man  stand  beside  it  to  give  a  standard 
of  size.  Likewise  it  is  hard  to  get  a 
true  scale  of  measurement  for  char- 
acters of  history,  because  they  may  be 
magnified  or  dwarfed  by  distance, 
contemporary  characters,  or  by  the 

67 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

imagination  of  succeeding  ages. 
Some  men  loom  large  in  history  for 
lack  of  great  men  near  them  to  reveal 
their  real  insignificance.  Let  us 
measure  the  personality  of  Jesus  by 
placing  alongside  him  two  men  who 
were  his  contemporaries;  and,  to  be 
absolutely  fair,  let  us  take  two  men 
who  were  spiritual  giants,  of  his  own 
nation,  and  standing  one  on  each  side 
of  him  in  the  order  of  their  historical 
appearance. 

There  is  first  John  the  Baptist, 
who,  Jesus  himself  said,  was  the 
greatest  of  all  the  prophets ;  nay  even, 
the  greatest  of  the  sons  of  women  up 
to  his  own  time.  John  came  to  a 
people  long  without  the  voice  of 
prophecy,  to  an  age  religiously  proud 
and  self-satisfied.  Yet  he  stirred 
the  pulses  of  that  crystallized  age  as 
Jewry  has  not  been  stirred  for  cen- 
turies, and  convinced  the  self-right- 

68 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

eous  people,  confident  of  their 
Abrahamic  blood,  that  they  must 
repent  of  their  sins  or  they  would 
never  see  the  kingdom  of  God.  He 
brought  the  masses  of  the  Jews  out 
to  the  Jordan  to  his  baptism  of 
repentance,  and  even  smoked  out  the 
complacent  Pharisees  with  his  predic- 
tions of  the  fires  of  judgment,  until 
that  "brood  of  vipers"  was  ready  to 
flee  from  the  imminent  Messianic 
wrath.  The  leaders  paid  him  the 
highest  tribute  by  asking  him 
whether  he  were  not  himself  the 
Messiah.  He  rebuked  Herod  the 
tetrarch  of  Galilee  for  his  adulterous 
marriage  with  Herodias,  and  made 
him  tremble  for  his  throne,  fearful 
lest  John  should  absolve  the  people 
from  their  allegiance.  Herod  did 
not  feel  himself  secure  until  John 
was  in  prison,  and  the  ambitious 
Herodias  could  net  rest  until  he  was 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

dead.  His  influence  was  so  lasting 
that  twenty-five  years  after  his  death 
there  were  disciples  of  John  in 
Ephesus  who  had  not  heard  of  Jesus ; 
and  at  the  end  of  the  first  Christian 
century  the  writer  of  the  Fourth  Gos- 
pel found  it  necessary  to  deny  that 
John  was  the  Messiah.  Yet  this 
stern  convicter  of  hearts  acknowl- 
edged it  more  fitting  that  Jesus 
should  baptize  him  than  that  he 
should  baptize  Jesus,  claimed  to  be 
unworthy  to  bear  Jesus'  sandals,  and 
turned  his  own  disciples  to  him  as  the 
expected  Messiah.  The  influence  of 
Jesus  so  speedily  assimilated  John's 
work  and  eclipsed  him  that  the  world 
has  never  realized  how  great  the  Bap- 
tist was. 

On  the  other  side  of  Jesus  is  the 
intense  and  commanding  personality 
of  Saul  of  Tarsus;  a  born  leader  of 
men,  everywhere  dividing  them  into 

70 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

those  that  followed  him  with  intense 
loyalty   and   those   who   feared   him 
with  intense  hate.     He  was  too  great 
to  remain  a  consistent  Pharisee.     He 
could  not  look  on  while  men  were 
undermining  the  religion  that  to  him 
was  the  only  hope  of  eternal  life  and 
say  with  the  'laissez-faire"  spirit  of 
his  master  Gamaliel,  "If  this  be  of 
God,  we  do  not  want  to  be  found 
opposing  it,  and  if  it  be  of  men  it 
will  come  to  naught  anyhow,  so  that 
we  need  not  bother  about  it."     He 
held   the    clothes    of    the    men    who 
stoned  Stephen  and  plunged  at  once 
into  a  persecution  of  extermination 
against  Christianity.     He  was  great 
enough  to  change  his  beliefs  at  the 
call    of    truth,    and    showed    in    his 
Christian  apostleship  the  same  daunt- 
less zeal  that  he  had  shown  in  his 
Pharisaism.     He    freed    the    gospel 
from    its    Jewish    swaddling-clothes 
71 


JESUS    or    NAZARETH 

and  proclaimed  it  in  its  freedom  and 
universality.  He  completely  over- 
shadowed the  original  twelve  apos- 
tles. He  put  the  impress  of  his 
experience  and  thinking  so  firmly 
upon  Christian  theology  that  it  has 
been  predominantly  Pauline  to  this 
day.  Handicapped  by  being  a 
despised  Jew,  and  by  the  doctrine  of 
a  crucified  Messiah,  "to  the  Jews  a 
stumbling-block  and  to  the  Greeks 
foolishness,"  he  went  forth  to  win  the 
Roman  world.  It  was  not  among 
the  credulous  and  unlearned  rural 
populations,  and  in  the  frontier 
provinces,  that  he  sought  his  fields, 
but  in  the  very  centers  of  Graeco- 
Roman  civilization.  He  worked  a 
year  in  Antioch,  three  years  in  Ephe- 
sus,  two  years  in  Corinth,  and  two  in 
Rome;  and  by  the  force  of  his  per- 
sonality he  so  planted  his  gospel  in 
these  capitals  that  the  power  of  the 

79 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

Caesars  thru  two  centuries  of  perse- 
cution could  not  root  it  up. 

Yet  this  giant,  when  he  met  with 
the  spirit  of  Jesus,  instantly  put  him- 
self at  his  service  and  asked  for 
orders.  Thereafter  the  superlative 
Pharisee  called  himself  the  chief  of 
sinners,  and  was  proud  to  sign  him- 
self the  slave  of  Jesus.  For  him  he 
abandoned  all  that  had  been  his  pride 
and  hope,  his  consuming  passion 
being  henceforth  to  attain  to  the  goal 
of  the  upward  calling  of  God  in 
Christ  Jesus.  Thus  it  is  that  Jesus 
appears  beside  his  greatest  contem- 
poraries, and  like  some  sun  draws  the 
mightiest  of  them  from  their  courses 
to  revolve  as  satellites  about  liim. 


7S 


CHAPTER  XIII. 

THE  NAME  ABOVE  EVERY 
NAME. 

Jesus'  influence  over  men  consti- 
tutes another  measure  of  his  great- 
ness. Just  as  astronomers  seek  to 
determine  the  magnitude  of  some 
comet  by  noting  its  pull  upon  the 
planets  and  their  satellites,  so  we  may- 
get  some  idea  of  the  power  of  Jesus 
as  we  observe  his  influence  on  those 
with  whom  he  came  in  contact.  We 
have  already  seen  his  influence  on 
John  the  Baptist  and  on  Paul.  We 
have  also  seen  how  the  Twelve  clung 
to  the  belief  that  he  was  the  Messiah, 
when  appearances  were  aU  to  the  con- 

74 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

trary;  even  tho  he  had  failed  to  do 
what  they  expected  of  the  Messiah; 
altho  his  own  nation  had  rejected 
him;  and  altho  he  had  told  them  his 
career  was  to  end  in  a  disgraceful 
death  which  was  to  their  minds  no 
part  of  the  Messiah's  destiny.  They 
kept  the  belief  because  they  could 
account  for  his  personal  power  and 
character  on  no  other  supposition 
than  that  he  was  the  Messiah.  And 
we  note  this  same  tendency  in  all  who 
came  to  know  Jesus  intimately:  to 
feel  that  nothing  short  of  their 
greatest  word  could  adequately 
describe  him.  To  that  section  of  the 
Jews  which  shared  the  Messianic 
hope,  there  was  no  greater  word  than 
Messiah,  which  might  be  applied  to 
anyone  in  the  likeness  of  man.  But 
w^hen  any  of  these  came  to  know 
Jesus  they  persisted  in  calling  him  the 
Christ  even  tho  at  the  cost  of  sufFer- 

75 


JESUS    OF    NAZAEETH 

ing  and  death.  The  author  of  the 
Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  MTiting  to 
Jews  of  Sadducean  tendencies,  to 
whom  the  temple  cultus  with  its 
priesthood  was  greater  than  the  Mes- 
sianic hope,  describes  Jesus  by  the 
greatest  word  they  know:  Jesus  is 
the  great  High  Priest,  and  to  make  it 
superlative,  "the  high  priest  forever 
after  the  order  of  Melchizedek." 
When  the  writer  of  the  Fourth  Gos- 
pel wishes  to  describe  Jesus  to  men 
of  Hellenistic  mind,  who  have  specu- 
lated of  possible  divine  "words"  that 
should  reveal  the  unknown  deity,  he 
calls  Jesus  the  "Word"  who  declares 
in  human  flesh  the  unseen  God. 
When  the  Nicene  fathers  undertook 
to  formulate  in  a  phrase  what  they 
felt  Jesus  to  be,  they  knew  no  name 
that  was  adequate,  except  "the  name 
that  is  above  every  name,"  and  so 
wrote  in  their  creed  that  he  was  "very 

76 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

God  of  very  God."  Thus  we  gather 
from  the  names  they  gave  him  how 
great  was  the  impression  Jesus  made 
on  the  first  generations  of  his  fol- 
lowers. 


77 


CHAPTER  XIV. 

PITTED  AGAINST  THE 
RABBIS, 

Some  impression  of  the  intellectual 
power  of  Jesus  has  been  gained 
from  the  consideration  of  the  truth 
and  originality  of  his  teaching. 
Another  measure  of  it  is  found  in 
the  scenes  of  Tuesday  of  Passion 
Week,  when  he  measured  wits  with 
the  trained  minds  of  the  Rabbis.  The 
intellectual  power  which  he  displayed 
was  due  mainly  to  his  native  ability, 
since  he  had  not  the  advantage  of 
extensive  study  in  the  schools.  The 
Jewish  leaders  had  decided  to  arrest 
Jesus,  but  found  an  obstacle  in  the 

78 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

crowds  that  had  saluted  him  as  ISIes- 
siah  during  the  Triumphal  Entry, 
and  which  still  hung  upon  his  words 
and  were  loyal  to  his  person.  Till 
these  were  alienated  from  him,  to 
arrest  him  meant  to  provoke  a  riot 
which  would  bring  down  Pilate's 
legions  upon  them  and  mar  the  feast 
of  the  passover  with  a  bloody  mas- 
sacre. So  the  leaders  undertook  to 
discredit  Jesus  before  the  crowds,  so 
that  the  latter  would  turn  away  from 
him  and  leave  them  free  to  dispose 
of  him  as  they  listed.  It  seemed  an 
easy  matter  to  make  this  simple- 
minded  provincial  say  some  foolish, 
blasphemous,  or  seditious  thing.  So 
the  contest  of  wits  between  Jesus  and 
the  best  trained  minds  of  Judaism, 
sharpened  by  malice,  began  and  con- 
tinued thruout  the  day. 

First,    they    asked    him    for    his 
authority  to  teach.    It  was  customary 

79 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

for  men,  who  were  deemed  compe- 
tent, to  be  publicly  authorized  as 
rabbis.  They  expected  Jesus  to  con- 
fess in  confusion  that  he  had  never 
been  ordained  as  a  rabbi,  and  then 
they  would  be  able  to  shame  the 
crowds  for  attaching  importance  to 
the  mouthings  of  an  unlettered 
upstart.  To  their  demand  for  his 
authority,  Jesus  replied  with  a 
counter-question:  Was  John  the 
Baptist  a  prophet  of  God  or  no? 
Now  this  was  not  a  mere  subterfuge. 
Had  they  been  sincere,  it  would  have 
put  them  on  the  way  to  the  truth 
about  him.  But  they  were  not  sin- 
cere, and  as  they  thought  it  over,  they 
found  it  was  not  Jesus  but  themselves 
who  were  embarrassed  by  their  ques- 
tion. If  they  should  answer  that 
John  was  a  true  prophet,  then  Jesus 
would  remind  them  that  John  had 
called  him  the  Messiah.     If  on  the 

80 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

other  hand,  they  said,  what  they 
really  believed,  that  John  was  not  a 
true  prophet,  they  would  discredit 
themselves  with  the  multitude,  for 
the  masses  firmly  believed  that  John 
was  sent  of  God.  The  result  was 
that  these  professed  oracles  and 
religious  leaders  of  God's  chosen 
people  publicly  professed  that  they 
could  not  tell  whether  or  no  a  man 
like  the  Baptist  spoke  by  the  Spirit 
of  God. 

Then  the  Pharisees  and  Herodians 
came  together.  They  asked  Jesus 
whether  it  was  right  to  pay  tribute  to 
Caesar.  If  he  should  answer  that  it 
was  lawful  to  pay  the  tribute,  the 
crowd  of  Galilean  zealots,  whose 
loyalty  to  Jesus  stood  in  the  way  of 
the  leaders'  purpose,  would  turn 
against  him;  for  it  was  the  funda- 
mental tenet  in  the  zealot  platform, 
that    the    Jews    had    no    king    but 

81 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

Jehovah  and  were  cowards  if  after 
God  they  paid  tribute  to  any  man. 
If,  on  the  other  hand,  Jesus  should 
say  it  was  wrong  to  pay  the  tribute, 
the  Herodians  would  report  to  Pilate 
that  the  Galilean  prophet  was  stir- 
ring up  sedition,  and  Pilate  would 
know  how  to  deal  effectually  with 
treason  against  Caesar.  It  was  a 
dangerous  dilemma,  and  on  one  horn 
or  the  other  of  it  they  felt  sure  Jesus 
would  be  caught.  In  reply  he  asked 
them  to  show  him  the  tribute  money, 
and  one  of  them  drew  from  the 
bosom  of  his  tunic  the  denarius  bear- 
ing the  name  and  image  of  Tiberius. 
Now  the  fact  that  these  Pharisees 
had  Caesar's  money  in  their  pockets, 
showed  that  they  had  assumed  obliga- 
tions to  Caesar  and  betrayed  their 
hypocrisy.  Pretending  to  have  scru- 
ples against  acknowledging  the  rights 
of    the    Gentile    government,    they 

82 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

nevertheless  availed  themselves  of  it 
whenever  it  served  their  selfish 
interests  to  do  so.  They  traded  with 
Caesar's  money,  took  advantage  of 
the  Roman  peace  to  ply  their  trades 
in  security,  and  appealed  to  the 
Roman  government  against  injustice 
on  the  part  of  even  their  own  coun- 
trymen. "Therefore,"  said  Jesus, 
"since  j^ou  have  thus  put  yourselves 
under  obligations  to  Caesar,  render 
to  him  M'hat  is  due  him  in  return,  and 
do  not  at  the  same  time  forget  to  pay 
what  you  owe  to  God  for  his  benefits 
to  you."  And  thus  Jesus  escaped  the 
snare  by  making  a  clear  and  simple 
distinction  as  to  men's  duties. 

Next  came  the  Sadducees  and 
sought  to  show  how  simple-minded 
Jesus  was  for  believing  in  the  resur- 
rection. They  cited  a  case,  such  as 
might  easily  arise  under  the  Pente- 
teuchal  laws,  of  seven  men  who  had 


[JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

had  the  same  wife  in  succession,  and 
asked  him  whose  wife  she  would  be 
in  the  resurrection.  Now  the  chief 
quahty  of  the  trained  mind  is  its 
abihty  to  make  fine  distinctions.  The 
untrained  usually  think  in  masses  and 
extremes.  To  a  child,  you  must  be 
bad  if  you  are  not  good;  the  thing 
that  is  not  white  must  be  black.  It 
is  an  evidence  of  culture  when  men 
begin  to  recognize  the  infinite  grada- 
tion of  grays  thru  which  white  shades 
into  black,  and  to  know  the  varying 
degrees  of  goodness  and  badness  that 
may  be  mixed  in  the  same  character. 
The  difficulty  of  the  Sadducees'  ques- 
tion lay  in  the  ridiculousness  of  a 
certain  conception  of  the  resurrection 
life,  which  seemed  to  make  belief  in 
any  kind  of  resurrection  altogether 
untenable.  But  Jesus  makes  the  dis- 
tinction, such  as  is  always  harder  to 
make  in  controversy  than  when  in  a 

84 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

judicial  frame  of  mind,  between  the 
false  assumption  and  the  actual  truth. 
They  assumed  that  the  resurrection 
is  a  simple  resumption  of  the  relations 
and  conditions  of  this  life.  This, 
Jesus  tells  them,  is  a  mistake.  In 
the  future  life  all  will  be  spiritual; 
and  marriage,  which  is  an  institution 
for  replenishing  a  mortal  race,  will 
be  no  longer  needed,  "for  neither  can 
they  die  any  more."  But  that  there 
is  a  real  resurrection  life  Jesus  proves 
to  these  Sadducees  from  the  only  part 
of  the  Old  Testament  which  they 
admit  as  authoritative, — the  Pente- 
teuch.  He  meets  them  on  their  o^vn 
ground  and  shows  them  that  the 
religious  relation  to  God  involves 
continued  life,  since  "God  is  not  the 
God  of  dead  men  but  of  living,  for 
all  live  unto  Him." 

After  the  discomfiture  of  the  Sad- 
ducees, one  of  the  scribes  came,  ask- 

85 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

ing  which  was  the  greatest  command- 
ment of  the  law.  The  trap  in  the 
question  lay  in  the  fact  that  accord- 
ing to  the  Jewish  view  all  com- 
mandments of  the  law  were  of  equal 
importance.  They  thought  God  just 
as  much  concerned  to  have  the  sac- 
rificial blood  sprinkled  on  a  certain 
side  of  the  altar  as  that  men  should 
observe  justice,  mercy,  and  the  love 
of  God.  For  Jesus  to  designate  one 
as  greater  than  another  would  be  like 
calling  one  book  of  the  Bible  more 
inspired  than  another.  Jesus  replied 
by  quoting  as  the  first  commandment 
that  passage  from  Deuteronomy  with 
which  the  Shema  began  in  the  syna- 
gogue service.  The  Jews  themselves 
had  put  it  first  in  their  study  and 
recitation  of  the  law  in  the  syna- 
gogue, since  it  furnished  the  motive 
for  the  observance  of  the  precepts  of 
the  law.    Alongside  this,  as  being 

86 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

like  it,  Jesus  put  a  passage  from 
Leviticus,  which  includes  within  its 
motive  all  precepts  of  social  right- 
eousness. The  scribe  "saved  his 
face"  b}^  declaring  courteously  that 
Jesus  had  answered  well. 

After  the  scribe  had  retired  no 
more  questions  were  asked ;  but  Jesus 
adopting  their  own  methods  turned 
upon  his  questioners.  Assuming  the 
Messianic  character  and  Davidic 
authorship  of  Psalm  110,  as  all  his 
hearers  did  without  question,  he 
asked  how  it  was  that  David  called 
the  Messiah  "Lord,"  if  he  were  his 
son.  It  was  almost  unthinkable  for 
a  Jewish  father  to  call  his  son, 
"Lord."  This  question  they  were 
unwilling  or  unable  to  answer,  since 
it  led  to  the  conclusion  that  the  INIes- 
siah  was  something  more  than  a  mere 
son  of  David  after  the  flesh,  more 
than    merely    a    political    successor. 

87 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

This  day  of  conflict,  begun  by  the 
leaders  in  order  to  discredit  Jesus 
before  the  multitudes  and  "take  him 
in  his  talk,"  ended  with  the  Rabbis 
baffled  and  silenced.  Jesus  had  come 
off  victorious  in  the  dangerous  play 
of  words,  and  with  terrific  denuncia- 
tions of  their  insincerity  and  spiritual 
incompetence,  he  swept  them  out  of 
the  temple  and  remained  undisputed 
master  of  the  situation.  He  was  an 
intellectual  giant. 


CHAPTER  XV. 

THE  POISE  OF  HIS  CHAR- 
ACTER. 

The  spiritual  power  of  Jesus, 
which  has  always  been  perceived 
more  fully  than  his  intellectual 
power,  is  seen  best  in  the  poise  of  his 
character  and  in  his  ability  to  touch 
the  consciences  of  men.  The  effect- 
iveness of  power  is  determined  by  its 
control  and  application.  A  powerful 
engine  would  soon  knock  itself  to 
pieces  without  a  governor.  Great 
spiritual  power  cannot  exist  except  in 
diffused  and  self-destructive  forms 
unless  accompanied  by  self-control 
and  concentration.     There  is  a  repose 

89 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

in  the  characters  of  men  that  is  due 
to  the  absence  of  personal  force,  but 
the  poise  of  Jesus'  character  was  due 
to  his  self-control.  He  was  complete 
master  of  his  powers  so  that  he  con- 
centrated his  energies  effectively  on 
the  supreme  purposes  of  his  life. 

We  find  this  manifest  first,  in  his 
physical  endurance.  It  was  not  the 
indifference  of  those  incapable  of 
suffering,  nor  the  stoicism  of  hard- 
ened natures,  but  that  endurance  of 
pain  for  higher  ends  which  is  the 
essence  of  all  moral  heroism.  For 
evidence  of  Jesus'  physical  courage 
and  endurance  we  turn  inevitably  to 
the  scene  on  Golgotha.  It  is  diffi- 
cult for  us  to-day  to  imagine  the  suf- 
ferings inflicted  by  crucifixion.  It 
was  a  Roman  refinement  of  an 
Assyrian  brutality.  The  victim  was 
placed  so  that  the  agonies  of  the  nail 
wounds  would  be  freshened  by  every 

90 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

effort  to  relieve  the  tortures  of  an 
unendurable  position,  until  at  last  the 
victim  died  of  starvation  or  blood- 
poisoning.  In  addition  to  this  Jesus 
had  been  scourged  before  the  cruci- 
fixion and  had  borne  the  beam  of  his 
cross  upon  his  lacerated  back  until  he 
fainted  under  it.  Yet  thru  the  long 
hours  upon  the  cross,  his  words  were 
almost  altogether  about  his  mission 
or  full  of  solicitude  for  those  about 
him, — for  the  soldiers  who  crucified 
him,  for  the  robber  suffering  at  his 
side,  and  for  his  mother  in  her  awful 
bereavement.  Only  once  did  a  cry 
of  physical  pain  escape  him.  Those 
who  know  of  the  torturing  thirst  that 
comes  from  loss  of  blood  to  soldiers 
left  wounded  on  the  battle-field,  will 
not  marvel  as  much  at  Jesus'  cry  "I 
thirst,"  as  at  the  spirit  that  refused 
the  stupefying  drink  of  myrrh.  We 
of   this    generation,    who    shrink    so 

91 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

quickly  from  the  post  of  the  foreign 
missionary  and  from  all  other  moral 
enterprizes  that  involve  danger,  dis- 
comfort, or  pain ;  who  take  refuge  so 
readily  from  pain  in  anesthetics  and 
anodynes,  can  understand  something 
of  the  moral  power  that  enabled 
Jesus  to  suffer  so  in  silence,  "for  the 
joy  that  was  set  before  him."  The 
Roman  centurion  who  guarded  the 
cross  was  accustomed  to  see  men 
suffer  and  die;  to  see  then  endure 
stoically  and  die  heroically;  and  yet 
the  spirit  with  which  Jesus  bore  his 
fate  made  the  Roman  exclaim 
"Surely  this  w^as  a  son  of  the  gods!" 
There  is  a  yet  greater  test  of  a 
man's  power  over  himself  than  the 
endurance  of  actual  pain.  In  the 
excitement  of  battle  or  the  passion  of 
conflict  men  may  face  danger  easily, 
tho  they  are  unable  to  go  in  cold- 
blood    to    certain    suffering.     The 

92 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

bravest  moment  in  John  Bunyan's 
life  was  when,  crouching  in  Bedford 
jail  with  the  threat  of  the  gallows 
over  him,  if  he  did  not  prove  untrue 
to  his  calling,  and  fearing  he  might 
disgrace  his  Master  by  going  to  the 
gallows  with  white  face  and  tottering 
knees,  he  still  resolved,  if  need  be,  to 
leap  boldly  off  the  ladder  with  the 
noose  about  his  neck,  "Come  heaven, 
come  hell."  Jesus'  greatest  courage 
was  not  that  shown  on  Golgotha,  but 
when  alone  in  Gethsemane  he  faced 
the  cross  and  still  held  true  to  his 
Father's  will;  or  when  a  year  before 
the  fatal  passover  he  foresaw  the 
awful  end,  and  yet  kept  on  his  way, 
or  even  when  he  set  out  for  Jeru- 
salem, knowing  he  was  on  his  way  to 
death.  The  twelve  were  brave  men, 
as  the  world  accounts  bravery, — 
hard}''  fishermen  who  often  braved 
the  storms  of  the  treacherous  lake  of 

93 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

Galilee.  Their  leader,  single-handed, 
attacked  a  Roman  cohort  in  the  gar- 
den of  Gethsemane.  But  Mark 
gives  us  this  contrast  between  Jesus 
and  them:  "And  they  were  on  the 
way,  going  up  to  Jerusalem;  and 
Jesus  was  going  before  them:  and 
they  were  amazed ;  and  they  that  fol- 
lowed were  afraid." 

A  greater  manifestation  of  Jesus' 
power  is  found  in  his  self-restraint  in 
regard  to  his  ministry.*  He  believed 
himself  as  the  Messiah  to  be  pos- 
sessed of  supernatural  powers,  but 
he  refused  of  set  purpose  to  employ 
his  powers  for  personal  advantage. 
He  refused  to  attempt  signs  from 
heaven  to  ease  the  labor  of  his  mis- 
sion ;  or  to  work  miracles  to  lift  him- 
self above  the  common  lot;  or  to 
invoke  as  a  means  of  escape  from 


*  Robinson,   Studies  in  the  Character  of  Christ, 
Chapter  I. 

94 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

suffering  the  angelic  legions  which  he 
believed  to  be  at  his  call  in  Geth- 
semane.  The  same  self-restraint 
shows  itself  in  connection  with  his 
work  of  healing.  When  he  found 
great  multitudes  of  ailing  people; 
when  he  found  the  porches  of  Beth- 
esda  full  of  sick-folk,  how  naturally 
we  expect  him  to  heal  them  every 
one.  But  he  resisted  the  impulse  to 
heal  either  from  love  of  glory,  from 
weakly  sentimentalism,  or  short- 
sighted sympathy.  He  felt  the 
divineness  of  the  natural  order ;  knew 
the  disciplinary  value  of  pain;  and 
reserved  his  power  for  the  blessing  of 
men  in  their  highest  and  completest 
selves.  He  never  healed  except  for 
the  good  of  the  afflicted, — the 
spiritual  as  well  as  the  physical  good. 
Jesus  shows  a  similar  self-restraint 
in  the  patience  and  perseverance  with 
which  he  pursued  his  purposes  amid 

95 


JESUS    OF    NAZAEETH 

the  course  of  events  which  he  could 
only  partially  control.  One  of  the 
most  trying  things  for  men  possessed 
by  noble  enthusiasms  is  to  have  to 
work  with  intractable  material;  to 
have  their  plans  thwarted  by  acci- 
dent; and  their  purposes  delayed 
equally  by  cunning  malice  and  ignor- 
ant good-intent.  Yet  Jesus  aston- 
ishes us  by  the  equipoise  of  temper 
with  which  he  pursues  his  goal;  by 
the  patience  with  which  he  awaits  his 
opportunity;  by  the  energy  with 
which  he  avails  himself  of  every 
opening,  and  by  the  skill  with  which 
he  turns  seeming  obstacles  to  account. 
He  refuses  to  be  hastened  until  his 
hour  has  come.  He  accepts  events 
as  God's  ordering.  He  goes  aside 
for  a  day's  rest,  but  finding  hungry 
and  needy  multitudes,  makes  the  day 
one  of  his  busiest,  as  he  feeds  the 
thousands,  soul  and  body.     Opposi- 

96 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

tion  drives  him  from  one  field  only 
to  send  him  to  one  more  fertile. 
When  the  hostility  of  the  Pharisees 
drives  him  from  Judea,  he  devotes 
himself  to  the  training  of  the  twelve ; 
and  the  treachery  of  Judas  brings 
him  to  the  triumphant  sacrifice  of  his 
cross. 


or 


CHAPTER  XVI. 

HIS  POWER  TO  TOUCH  THE 
CONSCIENCE. 

Jesus'  spiritual  power  was  not  only 
sufficient  to  keep  his  own  conscience 
clear,  but  to  quicken  the  consciences 
of  others.  John  the  Baptist  had 
preached  repentance  and  had  been 
wonderfully  successful  in  piercing 
the  armor  of  his  people's  self-com- 
placency. But  when  Jesus  began  to 
preach  the  same  message,  he  soon  out- 
stripped John  in  the  numbers  he 
brought  to  him  confessing  their  sins. 
Those  who  have  devoted  themselves 
to  the  task  of  stirring  the  feeble 
moral  consciousness  of  men  into  a 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

realization  of  their  sinfulness,  know 
what  a  task  it  is.  But  there  is  a 
harder  task;  after  men  have  been  led 
to  see  themselves  in  the  blaze  of 
divine  holiness,  and  so  to  know  their 
sinfulness;  after  they  have  had  their 
pride  broken  so  that  they  are  ready  to 
confess  their  weaknesses  and  sins, 
then  to  lift  them  up  in  hope  and  make 
them  believe  it  is  still  possible  for 
them  to  become  victorious  over  sin, 
and  live  lives  honorable  in  the  sight 
of  men  and  useful  in  the  service  of 
God, — this  is  the  harder  task.  Yet 
this  Jesus  was  strong  to  do.  He 
made  Peter  cry  out,  "Depart  from 
me  for  I  am  a  sinful  man,  O  Lord"; 
but  he  led  Peter  to  forsake  all  and 
follow  him.  Jesus'  look  broke 
Peter's  heart  and  sent  him  out  of 
Caiaphas'  palace  to  weep  bitterly; 
but  it  also  brought  him  back  to  Jesus 
by  the  Lake  of  Tiberias  with  his  pro- 

99 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

fession  of  humble  loyalty:  "Thou 
knowest  that  I  love  thee."  He 
touched  the  conscience  of  the  sinful 
woman  so  that  it  burned  with  her 
shame;  but  she  came  to  weep  in  his 
presence,  and  went  from  him  into 
peace  and  hope,  to  sin  no  more.  He 
had  the  power  to  call  out  the  highest 
in  men.  His  seemingly  impossible 
dreams  created  a  new  type  of 
spiritual,  altruistic  character.  He 
demanded  of  men  that  they  be  per- 
fect as  God  is  perfect ;  that  they  for- 
give one  another  as  God  forgives 
the  penitent;  that  they  love  one 
another  as  he  loved  them;  and  that 
they  take  up  the  cross  of  utter  self- 
abnegation  and  follow  him.  No 
other  character  in  history  has  set 
before  men,  in  example  and  precept, 
so  high  an  ideal  of  duty;  and  no 
other  has  opened  to  men  such  sluices 
of  enabling  power.     From  him  there 

100 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

has  flowed  thru  the  centuries  a 
steadily  widening  stream  of  personal, 
social,  and  civic  righteousness; 
because  weak,  erring,  common  men 
and  women  in  response  to  his 
demands  have  come  to  believe  in 
themselves;  because  his  faith  in  them 
has  made  them  worthy  of  his  trust. 
No  other  personage  has  been  able  to 
arouse  such  an  unselfish  enthusiasm 
for  humanity.  Men  admire  the  work 
of  other  geniuses,  but  they  do  not 
risk  their  lives  to  acquaint  savages 
and  aliens  with  the  tragedies  of 
Shakespeare  or  the  philosophy  of 
Plato.  Jesus  has  been  able  so  to 
enlist  the  loyalty  of  men,  that  the 
lives  of  missionaries  and  reformers 
and  martyrs  have  been  the  seed  of 
his  church,  and  so  to  direct  it,  that  his 
religion  is  the  religion  of  humanity. 


101 


CHAPTER  XVII. 

THE  COSMIC  MEANING  OF 
HIS  CHARACTER. 

Thus  far  we  have  been  occupied 
with  the  effort  to  ascertain  the  his- 
torical greatness  of  Jesus.  We  must 
now  try  to  find  an  explanation  of 
his  character  and  power  adequate  to 
account  for  his  knowledge  of  truth, 
the  perfection  of  his  character,  and 
the  potency  of  his  personal  influence. 
The  explanation  of  history  carries 
us  a  little  way,  hut  stops  short  of  the 
goal  of  our  quest.  History  con- 
tributes to  our  understanding  of  him, 
when  it  points  us  to  the  unique 
religious     capacity     and     spiritual 

103 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

passion  of  the  Hebrew  race;  to  the 
rich  heritage  of  the  Old  Testament 
Mterature  and  institutions  that  was 
his;  to  the  pure  and  tenacious  family 
life  of  the  Jews,  which  gave  content 
to  his  teaching;  and  to  the  Messianic 
hope  which  gave  at  once  the  sug- 
gestion of  his  mission  and  the  inter- 
pretative form  to  his  message.  It 
goes  further  when  it  calls  attention 
to  the  pious  group  of  men  and  women 
like  IMary  and  Elizabeth,  Zachariah 
and  Simeon,  from  which  he  sprang; 
and  to  the  exceptional  purity  of  his 
character  and  spirituality  of  his 
religious  experiences.  But  all  these 
leave  us  unsatisfied,  and  we  must 
turn  from  history  to  philosophy,  not 
for  the  solution  of  all  mysteries,  but 
for  an  estimate  of  his  cosmic  signifi- 
cance; for  such  a  correlation  of  Jesus 
of  Nazareth  with  the  thought-world 
in  which  we  live,  as  to  give  the  mind 

103 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

a  resting-place  and  bring  religious 
belief  into  harmony  with  experience. 
It  is  one  of  the  fundamental 
assumptions  of  all  our  thinking  that 
the  effect  must  be  included  in  the 
cause ;  that  what  is  evolved  must  first 
be  involved;  or,  to  put  it  in  the  lan- 
guage of  common-sense,  that  some- 
thing cannot  be  got  out  of  nothing. 
Whether  this  conviction  be  true 
absolutely,  the  philosophers  may  at 
times  dispute,  but  we  cannot  think 
without  making  such  an  assumption. 
When  we  find  a  white-petalled  water- 
lily  on  the  surface  of  a  pond,  we  may 
trace  its  stem  down  till  its  roots  dis- 
appear in  the  black  ooze  at  the  bot- 
tom. Now  no  dexterity  of  logic  can 
convince  us  that  a  white  lily  can  come 
out  of  black  mud,  unless  the  white- 
ness of  the  lily  was  potentially  there 
to  begin  with;  we  insist  that  the 
whiteness  was  there  in  the  seed  or  in 

104 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

some  of  the  elements  out  of  which  it 
grew,  before  the  whiteness  could 
appear  in  the  flower.  Sometime  since, 
application  was  made  for  a  patent  on 
a  process  for  changing  certain  ores 
of  antimony  into  gold.  The  Patent 
Office,  fearing  to  become  in  some 
degree  party  to  a  fraud,  sent  the 
formula  to  the  mint  to  be  tried.  The 
answer  from  the  mint  was  that,  if  the 
ores  in  question  were  treated  by  the 
process  described,  a  small  quantity  of 
gold  would  be  obtained,  because  the 
ores  contained  a  small  percentage  of 
gold.  No  way  is  known  as  yet  to  get 
gold  in  the  result,  unless  it  be  present 
in  the  material  used.  It  was  this 
same  line  of  reasoning  that  led  a 
prominent  English  philosopher  to  say 
that  by  no  known  alchemy  can  we 
get  golden  conduct  out  of  leaden 
motives.  By  the  same  reasoning, 
whatever  appears  in  the  course  of  the 

105 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

world's  evolution  must  be  already- 
present  in  the  creative  evolving 
causes.  If  personal  intelligence, 
sinlessness,  and  love  appear  in  the 
cosmic  process,  it  means  they  belong 
first  of  all  to  the  Creating  Cause  of 
the  universe.  By  no  alchemy  can 
Jesus  of  Nazareth  come  out  of  a 
materialistic  or  godless  universe. 

"A  fire-mist  and  a  planet, 

A  crystal  and  a  cell; 
A  jelly-fish  and  a  saurian. 

And  the  caves  where  the  cave-men 
dwell : — 
Then  a  sense  of  law  and  beauty, 
And    a    face    turned    from    the 
sod ; — 
Some  call  it  evolution, 
And  others  call  it  God." 


106 


CHAPTER  XVIII. 

THE  SECRET  OF  HIS 
POWER. 

The  cosmic  significance  of  Jesus, 
then,  Hes  in  what  he  visibly  makes 
known  of  the  Personal  Spirit  who  lies 
back  of  the  cosmic  process.  It  is 
also  in  his  relation  to  the  spiritual 
forces  of  the  world  that  the  secret  of 
his  power  is  to  be  sought.  On  a  clear 
summer  day  one  sometimes  sees  a 
fleecy  cloud  not  bigger  than  a  hand 
stand  out  for  a  moment  from  the  blue 
and  then  vanish  into  it  again.*  The 
evanescent  cloud  is  significant  only 
because  it  reveals  the  facts  and  forces 


•Brierly,  Ourselves  and  the  Universe,  page  300. 
107 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

that  produced  it;  because  it  is  a  vis- 
ible indication  of  the  vast  flood  of 
waters  that  hangs  otherwise  invisible 
in  the  air  above  us;  because  it  shows 
that  the  air  has  reached  the  point  of 
saturation  and  is  ready  to  begin  the 
precipitation  of  cloud  or  rain.  One 
may  see  at  night  upon  the  city  streets 
a  glowing  light  hanging  from  a 
couple  of  dark  wires.  Somewhere, 
unseen  by  the  man  on  the  street, 
masses  of  coal  are  dazzling  white  in 
the  furnaces  and  imprisoned  steam 
snarls  and  hisses  in  the  boilers;  but 
this  power  of  coal  and  steam  flows 
silent  and  unseen  in  the  black  wires, 
and  only  the  light  reveals  its  pres- 
ence. One  might  easily  think  the 
light  could  be  extinguished  with  the 
hand,  but  if  he  should  undertake  it  he 
would  encounter  the  vast  force  which 
the  feeble  manifestation  of  it  in  the 
light  had  not  prepared  him  to  expect. 

108 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

So  the  secret  of  Jesus'  power  lies  in 
the  spiritual  forces  that  came  to  vis- 
ible manifestation  in  him.  His  out- 
ward life  gave  no  indication  of  the 
power  behind  him.  When  most  of 
his  contemporaries  saw  him,  there  was 
"no  beauty  that  they  should  desire 
him,"  no  pomp  of  power  that  they 
should  fear  him.  When  he  became 
inconvenient  to  their  purposes,  they 
thought  it  easy  to  silence  him.  But 
his  persistent  influence  and  growing 
power  proved  a  puzzle  to  Pharisee 
and  Sadducee  alike.  They  put  him 
to  death,  but  his  death  seemed  but  to 
increase  his  influence.  Saul  of  Tarsus 
undertook  to  quench  Jesus'  move- 
ment, thinking  it  would  be  easy  to 
destroy  the  despised  sect,  and  then 
Saul  received  the  spiritual  shock  that 
utterly  transformed  him.  The  only 
explanation  of  what  happened  to 
him,  he  could  ever  give,  was  to  say 

109 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

that  "God  was  in  Christ,  reconciling 
the  world  to  himself."  Jesus'  most 
intimate  disciples  all  felt  and  said,  in 
one  way  or  another,  the  same  thing; 
that  they  came  nearest  God  and  felt 
His  uplifting  power  most  fully  when 
they  were  with  Jesus ;  that  to  see  him 
was  to  see  the  Father;  to  know  him 
was  eternal  life.  We  of  the  twentieth 
century  may  not  care  to  use  the  words 
of  the  first,  but  in  some  terms,  any 
adequate  explanation  of  Jesus  must 
be  virtually  the  explanation  of  his 
first  interpreters;  that  in  him  was 
manifest  in  terms  of  human  life,  the 
holiness,  love,  and  personal  power  of 
the  Universal  Character  we  call  God ; 
that  thru  him  the  spiritual  power  of 
God  most  eif  ectually  gripped  human 
history;  that  to  know  him  in  spiritual 
fellowship  is  to  be  placed  in  the  cir- 
cuit of  the  world's  redemptive  forces; 
is  to  be  driven  by  the  highest  motives 

110 


JESUS    OF    NAZARETH 

toward  man's  highest  ideals;  is  to 
have  life  raised  to  its  highest  power 
in  coordination  with  the  Infinite 
Father. 


Ill 


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